


Intertwined

by Ghostmonument



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, No use of y/n, am I weak for face touches and forehead kisses?, gender neutral reader, gentle romantic leanings here, it's mostly fluff, some angst but, who can say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 10:13:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19129957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostmonument/pseuds/Ghostmonument
Summary: Due to an injury from a previous adventure, you are left alone on the TARDIS while the rest of the team answers a distress call, even though they had planned to not do anything until you had healed. Insecure and heart-sore, you turn to music to try and handle your emotional turmoil, unaware that you have attracted the attention of the TARDIS... and the Doctor.Based on the song Intertwined by Dodie Clark!





	Intertwined

**Author's Note:**

> This was a requested prompt over on tumblr and I had a lot of fun with it. I avoided using any pronouns for the reader in this so it's accessible to all! Please excuse my loose grasp of ukulele knowledge; at the time of writing this I was unfamiliar with any stringed instruments but have since picked up ukulele, go figure. 
> 
> My requests are open as always, either here or on my tumblr, myghostmonument.

    
  
_I recommend listening to Intertwined first to get a feel for the tone of this piece! **[Listen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaHrWLCUmfc) **_

* * *

  
  
You were alone in your room. Alone, but for the music.

Your fingers strummed softly across the strings of your ukulele, the muted chords shivering in the still air of the room around you. Out of the corner of your eye you thought you saw the wall lights pulse in response, flaring and fading even as the notes of the chord seeped away into tremulous silence.

The TARDIS often did this, though you knew that if you turned your head, if you looked squarely at the lights which ran through all of the walls of your room, they would be still, quiescent, static. As if they were normal lights, in a normal wall. You smiled, slightly. As if they could ever pass as _normal_. You weren’t sure if the TARDIS’ reluctance to be caught in the act was due to shyness, or if she was just teasing you, but you didn’t mind. The ship clearly _enjoyed_ your music; how she expressed her appreciation was her own choice, and not for you to dictate.

You slid your fingers and plucked another set of strings, felt the minor chord shiver down your spine and resonate in your heart. It was melancholy, almost painful, and you closed your eyes, let the music and pain fill you like water, fill you till it seemed your very bones trembled with the emotion. Yes, it _did_ hurt, both the music and the emotions that you could feel roiling deep within it, a rising tide.

You couldn’t deny the tide, couldn’t turn it away… but you could _direct_ it. Your fingers moved across the strings, took control of the surging waves as you picked out a familiar pattern, a song you knew by heart. You didn’t mean to speak, but the words, the music, they could not be denied. They never could, in the end.

_“Skin,”_ you sang softly, opening your eyes, though you stared unseeing at your bedroom wall, at your unmade bed strewn with tousled blankets and open notebooks, all filled with hastily scribbled ideas for songs.

_“Heat,”_ you continued, your voice still falling delicately into the waiting air, your eyes still unseeing. _“Hair in your mouth…”_

A sudden vision of short, messy blond hair filled your mind and you blinked, fingers pressing convulsively against the strings of your ukulele and plunging the room into abrupt silence. You hadn’t even meant to start singing that song; you certainly hadn’t meant to let your thoughts stray to _her_.

You blew out a breath, annoyed with yourself. You’d sequestered yourself in your room in order to distract yourself from annoyingly intrusive thoughts like that one, like the way her hair curled so dynamically around her face, framing those bright, flashing hazel eyes and revealing the occasional freckle-

You growled, fingers plucking a strident, bright chord that made those lights in the corner of your vision flicker in surprise. Well, you chose to think of it as surprise. It was hard to attribute emotions to a timeship, even one as unique as the TARDIS.

“Sorry,” you muttered into the empty room, just in case. You stretched out your legs, or rather, your leg… and the cast. Your eyes narrowed as they fell to your cast, and you felt that churning sea of repressed emotion surge again in response, batter against the rocky shore of your control. Your hands twitched, moving as if of their own volition to again pluck out the familiar, deceptively cheerful notes. They didn’t fill the room so much as they sliced _through_ it, challenging the very air for space.

_“Oh,”_ you sang softly, though anger threatened to seep out from under the soft word, as insidious and encroaching as the tide, _“you, and I,”_ and your voice _had_ grown harder, the anger tempering the sadness, turning your words into weapons. _“Safe from the world, though the world will try-”_

Again, even as your voice rose, your eyes found your injured leg and the jolt in your concentration was enough to let in the intrusive thoughts. Thoughts and those treasured, painful memories of eyes like constellations and a voice like sunlight, feet and hands that could never stay still and a laugh that invited the entire world to laugh with it… all those memories, those pieces that created the whole of _her_.

You were still staring at your leg, eyes glazed in memory. Because if the Doctor’s laughter invited the world to laugh with her, her anger did the opposite, dared the world to so much as _breathe_ against her will. And she hadn’t been laughing when your leg had broken.

Smashed, really, as the tunnel you had been running through collapsed and a massive bit of rock had rebounded off the wall and into you. You were lucky that the rock had only hit your leg, and not your torso or head, and that you had been so close to the end of the tunnel where the TARDIS was parked. Lucky that you weren’t alone, too, because it had taken the combined efforts of the entire team to shift the rock off of your leg and get you into the TARDIS.

You didn’t remember the entire sequence of events, only jagged flashes. That was probably for the best; the pieces you did remember were razor-edged, difficult to hold in your mind. There had been a lot of screaming, and you suspected it had been yours. Or maybe it had just been the noise of the tunnel collapsing around you and your friends. You had awoken later in the TARDIS medical bay to find your left leg unrecognizable beneath bandages and a cast. It had hurt, but the pain was removed, somehow, as if a curtain had been drawn between it and you. The medbay was stocked with all sorts of advanced and alien tech.

“Nasty set of breaks, but you’ll be fine in a few days,” the Doctor had informed you, with what seemed to be her usual breezy cheerfulness. But when you were left alone again and examined the fragments of memory left to you, when you faced the blazing pain and heat and screaming that permeated those pieces, then you saw the Doctor’s face swim into view, and there was nothing cheerful within it at all.

You wondered if indeed your memories _weren’t_ as accurate as you’d thought, because you had never before seen such naked, terrible fury in that lovely face. In your broken shards of memory, the Doctor wasn’t a person so much as she was a storm with skin, eyes that blazed with fire and knowledge and _rage_ that dared the world to oppose her will, to set itself against her as she fought to free you from the rock, get you to safety.

_Safety._

You clenched your teeth, even as your hands moved again, began to pluck out the barest bones of the melody across the strings once more. The pain and song were one, and they would not be denied. There was too much truth in them. Because you were safe. And oh, how you hated it.

_“Oh, I’m afraid of the things in my brain,_

_“But we can stay here,_

_“And laugh away the fear-”_

You broke off, your last word ending on a gasp of rage and pain, oh, pain. Because that was the problem, wasn’t it? You were staying here, a discarded relic of the past while the glorious, impossible, frenetic life of the Doctor and her other companions continued on, as distant and unstoppable as the turning of the stars.

Oh, you believed the Doctor when she said that she hadn’t intended to initiate any new adventures until you were on your feet again, _believed_ that she earnestly meant it when she said the few days rest would do everyone some good. But the universe was vast and impossible, as ever-changing as the Doctor herself and just as opposed to staying still for the sake of one injured human’s pride. When the distress call had come in, the Doctor had not even paused before answering it. She wouldn’t be her, if she had.

“We’ll just nip out and sort this, you’ll be safe on the TARDIS!” she had called to you, throwing on her coat and flinging herself out into the new adventure with her normal overbrimming enthusiasm. Graham, Ryan and Yaz had of course accompanied her- why wouldn’t they? You were safe, on the TARDIS. You were unnecessary.

_Or worse,_ something dark whispered in your head: _you were a burden._ Oh, those thoughts in your head. How afraid of them you truly were. The tide surged again, beat against the rocks.

_“Numb,”_ you sang, brokenly, though your fingers were confident as ever they ghosted across the strings. _“Fine-”_

Your eyes had begun to prickle and sting.

_“You create a rarity of my genuine smile…”_ and you weren’t smiling, your lips were white, peeled back only enough to let the words out.

_“So breathe, breathe with me,”_ you whispered, the barest hint of the melody threading through your broken voice, _“can you drink all my thoughts because I can’t stand them-”_

And then you found that you could not continue to sing, could barely draw a breath around the pressure that had crept so insidiously around your chest and throat. Your fingers stilled on the ukulele, and the soft, discordant notes drifted away into nothingness, replaced instead with your ragged breathing. No, not just breathing: you realized, distantly, that you were crying.

You bowed your head, your hair falling as if to conceal your face, though the room was of course empty. Your hands clenched convulsively on the ukulele, and you could feel your shoulders shaking as the first ragged sob was followed by another, and another. You felt that your body might come apart at the seams with the violence and pain of it, but trying to suppress the sobs only made them worse, only tore at your throat.

Was that really the only choice left to you? To fight the grief and lose, or to surrender to it completely? To give up?

You raised your head sharply, blinked hot tears free from your narrowed eyes.

_No,_ you thought.

_“No,”_ you said.

Your voice rasped discordantly in the air, and again you saw the TARDIS lights flicker as if in surprise. You couldn’t deny the pain, but you could damn well control it. You could make it a part of yourself, give it voice through your music and bind it. You could feel the tide rolling in you, pressing against your senses as if your skin were a size too small, as if your body were no longer an appropriate vessel for all that you contained. And it wasn’t- _but that’s what the music was for._

So you straightened your spine, settled your hands on the instrument, lifted your chin. And you began to sing. If your pain was a surging tide, then your instrument was the ship that mastered it, and your voice the sails that guided it, and the music… The music was the wind itself, filling the sails, shaping the waves.

The music moved through you, and you sang. Without interruptions, without pauses or breaks in your voice. You just sang.

—————–

The Doctor was hunched over the TARDIS console, her fingers dancing deftly across various knobs, dials and buttons. She was in a generally good mood; the distress call had come from a ship crash-landed on an inhospitable but generally non-hostile planet. It was always nice when a planet or species turned out to be non-hostile. Nice, if a bit boring.

Okay, _really_ boring.

With the help of Graham, Ryan and Yaz, she had managed to help the crew with repairs, tend to some injuries, and make some new friends. Yes, a good, safe, _boring_ day. And it had been missing one human. Perhaps that was what had been nagging at her otherwise general contentment.

The Doctor blew out a breath, head tilted. While her hands had been busy, something had tried to catch her attention, something she’d missed. It _did_ happen, sometimes. Stilling her hands, the Doctor tried to in turn still her mind, and let her own thoughts catch up to herself. She’d been distracted by the taste of something… no, no, not taste. _Sound_. She’d heard… music. Could still hear it, in fact, though it faded in and out.

“Is that you?” she asked the console softly, resting a hand on the dashboard. The TARDIS hummed in response, then fell abruptly silent, even dimming the lights. The Doctor frowned, inexplicably uneasy in the sudden vacuum of sound. She felt as if she’d suddenly had one of her senses dulled, or had cotton stuffed in her ears. The many and varied electrical sounds, motions, feelings of the living TARDIS, they were as wired into the Doctor as her own heartbeats, and just as precious. Just as vital.

Still frowning, the Doctor’s free hand dipped into her coat, digging through a pocket and emerging with her stethoscope. She lifted it, but froze; she could hear the music again, louder now without the background noises of the TARDIS. _Ah._

“Not you, then,” she breathed, head cocked. The TARDIS thrummed back to life, apparently satisfied as lights reignited all along the console. “Developed a taste for the dramatic, haven’t you?” the Doctor murmured, replacing the stethoscope in her pocket. She straightened, brushed her wayward hair from her eyes and thought for a moment longer. Then she set off down a corridor, tracking the music, though she had a suspicion, a hunch even, that she knew now what was making the music. _Who_ was.

That nagging sense of loss, that person missing from the team, noticeable even on the most dull of days.

And as with most of her hunches, the Doctor had been right. The strains of music had led her unerringly to a doorway that she knew very well. It was open, just a crack, just enough to let the music out. Just enough to invite the Doctor in. She tried, generally, to respect the boundaries of her companions. She really did! She knew, rationally, that a slightly cracked door was in all likelihood not an invitation to enter. But she wasn’t thinking rationally, because the music was so clear now, and it swelled in her, captured her attention entirely.

The Doctor wasn’t aware of deciding to open to door wider, of silently stepping into the room. She was only aware of the music. It was simultaneously simple yet terribly complex, cheerful yet ragged with dark edges, innocent and so very weary. It was… beautiful.

The Doctor stood, entranced and silent, lips slightly parted in wonder and her eyes focused on the person in front of her, the source of such conflicted, tragic beauty.

She tried to respect boundaries; that didn’t mean she always _succeeded._

——–

_“Intertwined,_

_“Free,_

_“I’ve pinned each and every hope on you,_

_“I hope that you don’t bleed with me,_

_“I’m afraid of the things in my brain,_

_“But we can stay here… and laugh away the fear…”_

You strummed the final chord, let the final notes drift away into the dark, silent corners of the room. You could feel the tears that still ran down your face, but your voice had been clear, strong. You controlled the tide. You lifted a hand, brushed away a tear. In the corner of your eyes you could see the flickering lights of the TARDIS, and you managed a wry smile.

“Probably not my best performance, sorry,” you told the ship ruefully.

“It was brilliant, don’t be daft!”

Your heart stopped beating, it honestly did.

It then leapt into your throat and was entirely responsible for the choked, strangled nature of your shriek as you jumped violently at the utterly unexpected reply to your apology. You had one horrified moment to contemplate the expanding phenomenon of a speaking spaceship. Then you had banged your broken leg on the music stand and the TARDIS was temporarily forgotten as pain blazed up your leg and red tinted the edges of your vision.

“Sorry! Oh, sorry, I should’ve realized-” the Doctor appeared suddenly next to you, hands settling on your shoulders as she knelt down in front of you and kept you steady. You blinked at her, your heart still doing its best to crawl out of your throat.

“I thought for a second- the TARDIS-” you croaked weakly, fingers slowly unclenching on your ukulele. The pain in your leg was receding, drawing back into its shell. You exhaled violently, tipping your head back.

“The TARDIS? Nah, not much for talking back, that one. She prefers to play the silent and mysterious type generally,” the Doctor said cheerfully, but her eyes were roving your face. “She’s developed a taste for drama, if you ask me. You’re crying. Why are you crying?” she lifted a hand to your face as if to brush away a tear, but you jerked back and she let her hand fall slowly, a crease appearing by her eyebrow. You regretted that, regretted that you’d caused that expression to settle over her face, but you were too raw for her regard, for her touch.

“Is it your leg?” the Doctor asked, fishing her sonic out of her coat and running it up and down the length of your cast. “Hmm,” she said, staring at the sonic’s output. “Seems to be healing well; I think we can remove the cast in another few days.” She looked back up at you, head tilted. “Is it hurting you?”

“Not too much,” you replied, before you could think to lie.

“Thought as much. So what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” you said automatically, though you couldn’t hold her gaze when you said it.

“Rubbish liar,” the Doctor observed softly. Your eyes slid back to hers as if pulled magnetically. She didn’t look angry; she so rarely ever did. Instead those beautiful eyes met yours with gentle confusion… and compassion. You felt yourself drawn into that hazel gaze ( _was_ it hazel? Sometimes you felt that the universe itself was present in those eyes, infinite and ancient and ever changing-) and you blinked, looked away with an effort.

Her empathy and kindness, her very presence, it was all too much for your ragged, wounded heart, and you felt that tide rising in you again, threatening to carry you away. Tears pooled in your eyes and ran down the channels already marked on your face.

“Oh,” the Doctor said, quietly, and that one word resonated with such painful clarity in your heart that you thought you might just _shatter_ of it. “Oh, please can I help? Or should I just… leave?” She sounded so earnest, so _worried._ “If you’d rather be alone-”

_“No,”_ you rasped, without meaning to speak, but without the music to guide the tide it was raging in you, spilling out of your mouth and your eyes and you couldn’t deny it, you couldn’t stop it. “I don’t- I don’t want to be alone, but I am- and you don’t- you all don’t need me-” you finally wrestled control over the flow of your words, pressed your lips together, though it was much too late.

“Ahh,” the Doctor said, comprehension dawning in her eyes. Those eyes were still flickering over your face, occasionally glinting as the swirling gold flecks in them caught the light. You tried to be distracted by that, as you so often were. But you couldn’t, because the Doctor had again lifted a hand towards your face, and that promise of touch was so very much more distracting.

You didn’t flinch away this time. Instead you just closed your eyes, and inhaled when her knuckles brushed gently against your cheek. She wiped away a tear.

“I don’t like being alone either,” she confided softly, and there were traces of underlying pain and anger lurking beneath the light words. “But being alone can be good,” the Doctor continued, and her voice was warm, so warm you could _hear_ the small, earnest smile in it. “Especially when being alone keeps one safe and lets their mangled leg repair itself, hm?” She lifted her other hand, brushed away another tear. Then she just held your face, cradled between her warm hands. Looked at you.

“We _didn’t_ need you today, that’s true,” the Doctor continued frankly, and you were so startled that your eyes flew open, fixed on her own. She was still smiling slightly, her expression so soft and _knowing_ that it broke your heart, somehow. “Pretty simple fix, really. But we missed you, every step of the way. You are unique in the universe; there is no substitute for you, for your- your _youness._ ” Her nose crinkled as her smile deepened. “That’s why it’s so important that you rest, that you heal. Because none of us want to step out into the unknown again, not without you.” Her thumbs moved in half-circles on your face, gentle caresses.

“So we may not always _need_ you,” the Doctor said. “But we will always _want_ you. And that distinction is pretty thin, I reckon.” She leaned forward then, pressed her lips against your forehead and in the process managed to again stop your heart. You made a quiet sound, not quite a word, and felt her smile against your skin.

She drew back, and you could breathe again. Regretfully.

“No more tears?” the Doctor asked brightly, though her star-spun eyes still flickered over your face in watchful concern, and her hands still cupped your face.

“No more tears,” you agreed, starting to feel a bit ridiculous. The Doctor’s face relaxed into another smile, and it was as if the sun had come out from behind a cloud, that smile. You could feel it light up the room, feel it warm against your skin. You also couldn’t help but smile back, however crookedly. Yeah, you were definitely feeling ridiculous.

“So!” the Doctor rocked back on her heels, hands finally dropping from your face. “What was that you were singing? Will you sing it for me again? It was beautiful.” She said all of those things very fast, in one enthusiastic breath. You looked at each other for a moment, her eyes bright and expectant and soft, and you… well. Your crooked smile had straightened into something more genuine, and you sniffed, sitting up properly and nodding.

“Brilliant!” the Doctor bounded to her feet, then sat down on your bed with a flourish of her coat. She crossed her legs, propping her chin in one hand. You eyed her for a moment, this strange, glorious, absurd, wonderful alien that had curled up in your bed, in your life. _In your heart._ You looked away, cleared your throat.

“It’s a song called _Intertwined,_ by Dodie,” you said, fingers curving around the ukulele and picking out the first chord, delicate, hesitant.

There was still pain, yes. Some. There probably always would be. That was life, wasn’t it? But that was okay. You controlled the tide, and you weren’t going to miss any moment of where it took you.Your fingers moved, filling the room with music, and you closed your eyes.

You let the music carry you; it always would.

You sang.


End file.
